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Chapter One examines the relationship between metropolitan and colonial writers at midcentury. It discusses the BBC as a model of a metropolitan cultural institution that promoted collaboration between metropolitan intellectuals and their colonial counterparts. It argues that aesthetic autonomy was a key modernist doctrine that facilitated cooperation across the racial divide. Black, colonial writers, this chapter contends, were instrumental in explaining the relevance of modernist aesthetics to a decolonizing world, using the concept of aesthetic autonomy to insist that the sphere of high literature could transcend the injustices of a colonial system based on racial discrimination.

Placing CLR James’s utopian plan for Caribbean federation alongside Indonesia’s self-presentation as an archipelagic state, this chapter illuminates a critical but overlooked element in the history of midcentury decolonization and Caribbean thought: the conceptualization of Caribbean identity and political unity as a relation among islands, outside of the limiting frameworks of nation states and continents and of colonies and Empires. While seldom seen as central to Caribbean literature and thought of the 1950s, James’s work, particularly Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (1952) articulated this concept more fully. This chapter places James’s thought in relation the Bandung Conference, UN debates on ocean states, and international law. It concludes that James’s vision is important to reintegrate into our understanding of the 1950s because it corroborates scholars’ sense that nationalism on the one hand, and exile and diaspora on the other, are not the only frames within which to understand Caribbean literature.

In this chapter I examine James’s and Oiticica’s “discovery” of what I conceive of to be the active remains of the motley crew in the aesthetic sociality of blackness. I explore the claim they each make on it, on its modes of composition, arrangement and assembly, and the claim it makes on them, by way of some of their early experiments—James’s Minty Alley, the novel he wrote in Trinidad as an “exercise,” and Oiticica’s Parangolé, the banners, tents and capes whose activation would constitute what he would come to describe, through a phrase he adopts from Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa, as an “experimental exercise of freedom.” Both claim the aesthetic sociality of blackness by “appropriating” elements of the creative practices they encountered, the spectacular performance of cricket and samba and the more quotidian performances connected to them, the forms of assembly that James observed in conversations in the barrack-yards and that Oiticica observed in the architecture of the favelas. I look at the ways their claims take shape in these early works and the way the counterclaim of that sociality opens up those shapes, using it as a vehicle for its own expression, one that can’t quite be contained by the works themselves or the gesture of appropriation.

In this chapter I examine James’s and Oiticica’s entries into the U.S. and their attempts to situate themselves there. Cut off from the contact they had once had with this aesthetic sociality, contact that had radicalized their earlier work, they try to reconstruct the conditions of possibility for something like it in the U.S. They both imagine a kind of communion with the population at large, in communal modes of reception of popular art, but the opportunity for such reception is elusive, already lost or still anticipated, or only temporary, fleeting. In the face of this inconstancy, they work toward the construction of new apparatuses—the Correspondence organization and organ and living and working spaces called “nests”—in and through which they hoped to invite and structure contact, including contact with and between those forces they found most vital in the U.S., the disenfranchised, the marginal, the queer, the ones who precariously inhabit citizenship’s outer edge in modes of aesthetic sociality that were both severely constrained and unprecedentedly open. The new forms of aesthetic sociality James and Oiticica sought would take shape in and through new experimental practices that attempted to reformulate the very idea of work or working as their bases.

The Race Today Collective occupied a unique position on the British left during the 1980s. Inspired by the example of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the thought of radicals such as CLR James and Walter Rodney, and drawing activists from radical organisations such as the Black Panthers and the Black Unity and Freedom Party, the Race Today Collective became the most influential black rights group in Britain in the 1980s. Centred around a magazine, Darcus Howe and the Collective organised some of the most important grassroots campaigns of the decade, bringing black power to housing, industry, policing and the arts. This chapter considers the group’s emergence in the 1970s, the intellectual foundations on which the Collective was built, its distinctive approach to campaigning, its relationship to various ‘white left’ groups, and the different aspects of its work during the 1980s.

In this chapter I examine what was produced by way of the work or working in the organization/organ and the nests: an effusion of documents, largely proposals for projects that have yet to be carried out. I examine two key texts—not the master works for which James and Oiticica are generally recognized, but ambitious, messy, unresolved, unfinished works that lay, for a long time, unedited in their archives, “Notes on American Civilization” and Newyorkaises, considering they way they are proposed but not (until posthumously published) closed, and examine their resistance to the terminal condition of “work,” which they manifest as documents, or undocuments, that aspire to their own dissolution in a socialization of the intellectual function that would enact the very sociality James and Oiticica desire. I argue that these open documents or undocuments are the site, or at least a site, through which the motley crew or something like it might be reproduced and extended. I explore their reconfigurations of reproduction, as a sexual, but not necessarily heterosexual or even biological process. By ending (or not ending) with their non-endings, I mean to offer not conclusion to the experiment pursued here, but an invitation to begin it anew.